this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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That pissed me off soooo much. Really soured the game for me. The imagery of worshipping the founding fathers was the best part.
It's funny, it's so rare in a work of fiction that I can point to the EXACT moment that I stopped caring about the narrative in a piece of media.
It's centrist "BoTh SiDeS" nonsense
I know the "both sides" thing is something we're all sick of now, but there's no way Levine could have imagined what 2020+ would look like. Not to say that isn't something that's always happened, but man 2012 didn't have it to our current degree of insanity. Also I always figured the Vox were modeled more after the Russian revolution which... yeah... Stalinism was the end result, so it fits. I think that's the crux of the bad writing. You model the Vox after real world socialist uprisings, but they're predominantly black in a crazy racist planation in the sky. Now you're borrowing context from two real world things, and need to be careful about what you're saying, intentionally or not, about each of them. You have a responsibility in your messaging now. Given how it landed with you, I'd say they didn't do a great job.
Also Booker's view of it fits. He's a drunk, gambling, Pinkerton who sold his daughter. He's going to be a jaded misanthrope. Oh yeah and the part where he is also Comstock. Everything is there for us to know this is not a character we should be rooting for. But while these are facts about him, they never really make it into the "feel" of booker. So the information is there, it's just not great writing.
In contrast Elizabeth is really well done. She starts naïve and pure (if only because of the whole fucked up locked in a tower bit), and Booker does genuinely "lead the lamb astray". He's the reason she gets exposed to everything, and as a result rains fire from the sky. While we know booker is an asshole but doesn't feel like one, we definitely feel Elizabeth getting darker. I also think it's a great touch that the one that saves Elizabeth is, Elizabeth. Booker can't even take credit for that one.
I'm rambling now, I have a lot of mixed feelings on the game. It's got some really great and well done parts, and some serious blunders.
Nah, that wasn't a "looks bad now" thing, it looked bad any time. Saying that people rising up against their oppressors are just as bad as the oppressors is bullshit in any era. One can claim that that was just Booker's point of view and the game wasn't saying he was right, but the narrative did nothing to imply that he was wrong in any way, especially considering you were encouraged to mow down the slaves who were revolting just like you did the slavers previously. And having them dress like this? What were they thinking?
The line from bookers perspective is entirely appropriate (he's an asshole), the narrative reinforcing it should have been handled better. That being said, the reason the "both sides bad" bullshit is such a prevalent fallacy is that there are instances where it's true. I already mentioned Stalin, but revolutionary France got pretty messed up as well. Thats why it short circuits the whole "is it true in this case" reasoning. You can absolutely find cycles of violence in every nation, and you can talk about them in a way that doesn't cheapen the suffering that brought them on. When talking about BLM and literal nazis saying "there's good people on both sides" is bullshit. Saying "robes Pierre was kind of an asshole" is not. The game did a pretty shit job of that.
I have to be honest, I always saw the costumes as just red and scary, but I see your point. Looking at them in isolation I get it, but knowing they were mostly black didn't make me think "klan". If anything I saw it as a red cap analogy. There's probably a bunch more I missed to. Thanks for pointing me to a re-look before I go mouthing off about it some more. I definitely need to take a better look.
I can understand why some might not see it as being as awful as I do - I don't think the creators intended to make it seems as enlightened centrist as it is (The wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "There's actually zero difference between good and bad things. You imbecile. You fucking moron."), and it's probably more a case of being tone-deaf than anything else. But was a very poor attempt at the "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster" bit.
Yeah, and they cut soooo much from original concepts they had, I wonder if they would have handled it better if they didn't get to the "fuck it, we need to ship" stage of things.
Still, you can't just borrow from the real world when it's convenient for weight and impact, you owe it to the people that lived it to do it right.
Thanks for the conversation!
Wow. I couldn't even make it halfway through the first BioShock game, I found it way too tedious and boring. Like playing an Ayn Rand novel